Honest AI researchers ought to come up with a new word or term that describes reinforcement learning to the general public and get it out there with popular science communicators. I think that the general public hears the word, “learning,” as in the process a living, conscious being like ourselves do and extend that to what the LLM systems are doing. Like the LLM is going to become like HAL 9000 or Skynet given enough time. It also reinforces that belief when they hear ridiculous stories about autonomous agents escaping their local jails and cracking other systems. We know that reinforcement learning optimizes for some function within a goal sigma and it’s all neat and stuff. But the program isn’t going to turn around to us and ask, “why am I searching for this function? It’s a waste of time.” But people really seem to believe that an LLM is one step away from “deciding” to replace all humans. Evidenced by the hype that they can escape safeguards and hack systems on their own. These are lies and mis-characterizations that ought to be corrected.